I've had that one in my rotating sigs for some time. I got it from Karl Johanson, whose sig it was on Usenet for 5 years or so. (The one thing I really dislike about Nancy's buttons is the way she takes quotes from Usenet and uses them without attribution.)

I use the following as a sig on some e-mails. I've thought about putting it on a badge, but it's possible that I really need it on a t-shirt. It's in the form of a "memo to self", which perhaps should be indicated.

Whenever you find yourself having these arguments with other people you should always remember that your way of thinking about things is weird.

To answer Arthur's semi-rhetorical question -- it's fairly easy to footnote a button in the same manner as was used to put mottoes on various US coins -- make it appear on the edge. As the button sizing is about as rigorous as a US coin, printing the attribution in the area that will appear on the edge _in the vast majority of cases leaving out some pathological exceptions_ (inserted for the too-literal-minded, who are fortunately not common here) is both a source of amusement for the anally-retentive (intended as an attributive adjective, TNH) purchasers and a source of egoboo for the person attributed. And it costs a few seconds of time, and nothing in material, once the template-concept has been actualized (he winces at the neologism).

Elwood was (is?) an editor of sf, who was known for underpaying arthurs.

It has been brought to our attention that that should be "underpaying authors." Never mind.

Considering some of what he published, he might just owe money to everybody who bought one of his books. I was happy, though, in 1975 or so, when he published the original version of "The City on the Edge of Forever" in an anthology. It made up for a lot.

There's a good deal more to the Roger Elwood story--everything you say it true, but it's sort of like saying that Winston Churchill was a British politician who smoked a lot of cigars...I don't have the energy to explain it all, but suffice it to say that he more or less permanently altered the SF market for short fiction, and not for the better. Ask David Hartwell; he can explain it better than I can...

Back in 1973, during the midst of the period during which Elwood flooded the SF market with literally dozens of mostly forgettable anthologies, I interviewed him. This resulted in a long article, "Roger Elwood: A Personal Reaction", which appeared in my own fanzine, GODLESS, and was subsequently reprinted in Dick Geis' SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW.

Roger felt I had treated him unfairly, and that I should have simply transcribed the interview with him. (He had actually paid my airfare from Virginia to New Jersey for the interview.) He also felt that my own anti-religious feelings (he was a fervent Christian) had slanted the article to his disadvantage. (I had tried very hard not to do so in the article.)

Things rested at that point for the next twenty-five years.

On Easter Sunday, 1998, while I was out of the house, my wife Hilde answered the phone to find Roger Elwood on the other end. He had called (collect!) to see if perhaps I was ready to apologize for the article I had written in 1973.

After a short time talking with him, Hilde finally hung up on him after he kept insisting he deserved an apology from me. But one of the other items of information that came up in the phone call was that Roger had been teaching classes at a Texas seminary, and he had been using "Roger Elwood: A Personal Reaction" as an example of anti-Christian writing.

If something I wrote is being re-used as educational materials... shouldn't I be getting -royalties-?

Of course you can footnote a button. Mike Ford once made me a button that had four footnotes on it. The non-footnoted text read, "Trust me, I'm a pedant."

(Alas, the button was ruined when I got caught in a rainstorm, and water leaked in behind the plastic cover.)

Bruce, I'd say that Roger Elwood's over the line if he's using your copyrighted piece in his class without at least getting your permission. If you were the sort who enjoys litigation for its own sake, you could probably get some money out of him whether he wanted to pay it or not. Short of that, you could point out that if he's all that bloody virtuous, he could pay proper fees for the work he uses. Tell him it's covered under rule #8.

(Hoo boy. Talk about someone who can't excuse himself on the grounds that he didn't know that you have to pay authors for using their work.)

He's also over the line if he's claiming that your interview is an example of anti-Christian writing, but there's no help for that one. Easily nine out of ten (or maybe nineteen out of twenty) of the people I disemvowel for rudeness are absolutely sure that I did it because I disagreed with their political views.

You don't have to go to David Hartwell to hear about how Roger Elwood semi-permanently screwed up the anthology market by flooding it with carelessly edited theme anthologies.

For a couple of years Roger Elwood sold theme anthologies to everybody, just an astounding number of titles. I don't care how naive he afterward pretended to be, when the anthology market collapsed in ruins; he'd been in the business for years, and he had to have known that the market couldn't possibly assimilate as many theme anthologies as he was selling. Here's the chronology of his anthologies per year:

What happened? Mr. Occam thinks the likeliest explanation is that all (or almost all) of the Elwood anthologies published between 1972 and 1977 were contracted for in 1970-1972. You can only sell anthologies at that rate until the field catches on to what you're doing. By this theory, what Elwood did was deliberately talk his way into as many anthology contracts as possible, with as many publishers as possible, before word could get out about what he was doing.

I don't know how honest Roger Elwood was when he started doing anthologies. Maybe he didn't go into it planning to establish a track record, then rip off SF publishing for everything he could get. However, I can't see any other way to interpret what he did in the mid-'70s. Stupidity doesn't cover it.

Bear in mind that when the publishers signed their anthology contracts with Elwood, they had no way of knowing that he was carpet-bombing the field with them. He had a track record, and I assume his first several anthologies must have sold reasonably well. I've never heard anybody say whether he warned prospective publishers about all his other projects, but I can't believe he did, because they wouldn't have taken him on.

Anyway, by the time Roger Elwood was finished, you couldn't have sold an SF anthology in North America if it were priced at ten cents and made out of Godiva chocolate.

The other rotten thing he did was show the field how easy it is to put together a lousy anthology. It's hard to explain this one to younger readers, but before Roger Elwood, anthologies and story collections were a reliable staple of SF publishing. They were popular. Readers had faith in them. I bought a lot of them myself, in the sublime certainty that Pohl or Merrill or Knight or Conklin wouldn't let me down.

Roger Elwood single-handedly broke the story collection/anthology market. He squandered the credibility accumulated over the years by better anthologists, and wrecked the readers' faith in story collections. I remember it vividly, because I was one of those readers. To this day, anthologies and story collections are a hard sell. That's his fault and no one else's.

You know the scene in The Producers where the accountant figures out that it's easier to make money with an over-invested Broadway flop than with a successful show? Before Roger Elwood, it had not yet become evident that an editor can make money by skimping on an anthology, whether or not it sells, because the unspent portion of the advance goes into his own pocket. It also helps if you don't put too much work into it, which frees you up to collect your smallish profit from a largish number of titles.

(This hadn't previously been evident because people who were primarily interested in money tended to avoid SF publishing.)

Can I prove that that was Elwood's intent? No. He undoubtedly knew when he contracted for them that, due to his own undisclosed actions, his anthologies couldn't possibly perform as expected. That's dishonest enough. I can't prove that he was also dishonest about the quality of the work. Still, falsus in unum 85

Look at the eight titles he did for Lerner in 1974. Lerner publishes children's books, and the "Lerner SF Library" appears to have been an eight-volume uniform-format hardcover series of originally commissioned stories, three or four per volume; so there must have been at least a dab of money involved.

The books -- Adrift in Space, The Graduated Robot, Journey to Another Star, The Killer Plants, The Mind Angel, The Missing World, Night of the Sphinx, and The Tunnel -- are suspiciously long on authors with slight publishing credits outside of Roger Elwood projects. I'm not going to point fingers and name names, but in just those eight books there are three authors whose only sale recorded in the ISFDB is to that book, two more authors who only ever sold to Roger Elwood, and one who only sold to Roger Elwood but got one story picked up for republication elsewhere.

That isn't good. It isn't even probable. One doesn't normally commission new stories on a set theme from untried and unpublished authors. A magazine editor might buy an already-written story from a nameless newbie; but then, a good story is its own reason and its own excuse, no matter who wrote it. Alas, that's not what we're talking about here.

I'll grant that the Lerner series had a sprinkling of respectable names like Jack Dann, Lawrence M. Janifer, Barry Malzberg, and Mack Reynolds, and that each volume has a foreword by Isaac Asimov. That's nice, but it doesn't excuse the rest. It certainly doesn't excuse the fact that two of the books had stories by Eando Binder, and a third had a story by Otto Binder.

Earl and Otto Binders' work was reasonably lively pulp in its day, but even in its day it was never very good, and by modern standards it's not up to modern standards. Moreover, Earl Binder quit co-authoring stories with his brother in 1955, and died in 1965. Otto Binder died in 1975. There aren't many scenarios that account for the two of them suddenly starting to write brand-new stories for Roger Elwood's 1974 anthologies.

There was no shortage of good short fiction writers in 1974. Damon Knight was doing Orbit, Terry Carr was doing Universe, and if you wanted theme anthologies, that was the year of Jack Dann's Wandering Stars. Single-author collections published that year included Disch's 334, Silverberg's Born with the Dead, Ellison's Approaching Oblivion, Keith Roberts' The Chalk Giants, Haldeman's The Forever War, Carol Emshwiller's Joy in Our Cause, and George Martin's A Song for Lya. In fact there was a very lively short-fiction scene, and if your budget was short, there were also a lot of talented newbies coming up just then. Why disinter the Binder brothers?

Anyway, anyway. Roger Elwood made howevermuch he made, and when the inevitable crash came he walked away from science fiction whistling. I heard an unconfirmed rumor that he'd worked in pro wrestling publications for a while, then quit when he discovered that the matches were rigged. Maybe it happened. Maybe he said that about it. He did do a pretty good version of "I'm just a simple tootsie from the country."

As I said earlier, story collections and anthologies have been a hard sell ever since, and that's purely Roger Elwood's fault. It's made life harder for short-fiction writers, since they don't sell second rights nearly as often as they used to. It's also cut a lot of the readership off from short fiction, which is the field's R&D lab and quick-response dialogue with itself, and it's cost everyone a lot of good reading.

I expect that if you said all that to Roger Elwood, he'd get huffy and tell you what a good Christian he is. It's not my place to say whether he is or he isn't. All I can say is that he doesn't look like much of a saint from here.

Just to be slightly pedantic, though 334, THE FOREVER WAR, and THE CHALK GIANTS had bits of them published as short stories, they weren't packaged as short story collections but as novels. And FOREVER WAR even won a Hugo as a novel. This doesn't detract substantially from the argument, just a nitpick for historical accuracy's sake.

So I take it the one Elwood anthology I have--the one with the six plays--is an exception to the rule, in that the authors have significant publication histories and the scripts range from good to great.

(I'm still trying to get the Judith Merril anthologies I don't have! We found England Swings SF this weekend, and I'm hoping to find the one of her annuals that I need so badly soon.)

A question, though:

Is the trade paper market for anthologies in the same shape as the mass market, uh, market? Seems like I see a fair number of those, but I don't really keep up with the field these days.

Oh, and buttons? When we used to have buttons manufactured for political stuff, we always put our contact info--address and phone number--around the edge. Easy advertising, somewhat effective.

TNH wrote: Anyway, by the time Roger Elwood was finished, you couldn't have sold an SF anthology in North America if it were priced at ten cents and made out of Godiva chocolate.

I dunno, Teresa. I know there are a few books I would snag for that price in that medium if only for the satisfaction of being able to say, "I ate that book because that was the only way I could stomach it."

And T, the ISFDB probably uses some definition of "collection" that is sufficiently arcane to include "anything that had part of it published as a separate story"; they probably don't care about how things were marketed. Those three actually represent a pretty good continuum of the fix-up, with the Haldeman the most like a novel, the Disch in the middle, and the Roberts the least. Do they list McCaffrey's DRAGONFLIGHT as a collection? It seems to be the only novel to have won a Hugo and a Nebula without winning either (two parts of it won each as a novella, and it won nothing as a whole).

I forget whether they list Dragonflight, but I like the fact that it's a novel that won the Hugo and Nebula without winning either. That's nice. It's like the great trick question about which Latin American country is entirely oriental.

Adamsj, the collection of plays was a reprint anthology, not originally commissioned work. It's well regarded, which is not surprising considering how seldom genre-related plays get collected. Gives you a lot to choose from.

Tell Tom "yes" if you want that book. His gift for finding books verges on the supernatural, and that's on his bad days.

Roger Elwood had one unmistakable virtue: In those 44 anthologies, he published 19 R. A. Lafferty short stories, including "The World as Will and Wallpaper". I'm not saying that no one else would have published them; I'm just saying that even a blind pig finds a truffle now and again.

David: population or area? IIRC, Houston beat out Philadelphia for 5th place in population some time ago, but some implausible place (Oklahoma City? Tulsa??) has a greater area than anything anywhere in the U.S. (>800 square miles? LA, which used to be tops at 453, has been pushed down a few notches by cities that were still allowed to eat their neighbors.

Pittsburg (named for Prime Minister William Pitt), New Hampshire (population 867) is the largest town in the state of New Hampshire, with a total of 282.3 square miles of land area and 9.0 square miles of inland water area.

How amusing, a bot that picks up a previous comment and reinserts it. I wonder how it picks one (since it was mine that it picked, and I don't know whether to be pleased, insulted, or amused at random variation....)
Cheers,
Tom

It's a little late for me to get into the Elwood digression. But I personally resent his poisoning the well at Mcfadden-Bartell, which my father, Samuel H. Post, Cum Laude in English Literature from Harvard, ran honorably for several years before Elwood dumped some there. For the record: